The New and Improved Romie Futch (26 page)

Infernal, lung-curdling smoke? Check.

Eardrum-bursting, satanic thunder? Check.

Multitudes of shrieking imps? Check.

I kept inspecting my ears for oozing blood. Kept fingering my sunburned scalp. There was no shade to speak of. The fiberglass bleacher seats were not easy on the ass. I had the gut feeling I was trapped there eternally, back behind First Baptist's aluminum-sided temple, where a vast, chemical-green lawn rolled down to a pasture that'd been converted into a rough-terrain ATV park called the Wilderness.

The heats of the LastCar Rapture Series had been divided by age, and we'd just watched a bunch of six- to eight-year-olds compete on Titan 110 mini quads. Nine-to-elevens were up next.
But the youth minister had to deliver a sermon between heats, in which he compared the young drivers to Christian warriors slaying heathens in the wilderness. Using terms like “kick butt,” “awesome,” “score,” and “sweet,” he asked God to protect them on their mission and reminded them that Jesus was their copilot.

Pastor Logan was an athletic thirtysomething with a tatt of Jesus on his right tricep. He had a forward-sweeping flurry of emo hair, plus a greasy feather of a mustache that had yet to reach its manly potential. After his sermon, he walked over to shake our hands. Thanked Chip for the righteous thirty percent discount he'd bestowed upon the church, whereupon it became obvious that Chip had been dabbling in organized religion.

“Wipe that grin off your face,” Chip said when the boy of God was out of earshot.

“You actually go to church?” I said.

“Look,” he said, “I'm no atheist.”

“I'm not either,” I said, “more like an agnostic relativist if you want to mince hairs, but organized religion? As the good book sayeth,
The Most High dwelleth not in temples made by human hands
. Christians are some of the most unchristian people I know. And Baptists? Jesus motherfucking Christ.”

Chip frowned. “Don't talk shit about Jesus.”

“If Jesus is God and God impregnated Mary, then . . .”

“Damn it, Romie. I was raised Baptist. The Baptists in this town do well for themselves. Church is awesome for networking. I'm not going to be crass and mention a number or anything, but do you know how many ATVs I've sold since I started attending services back in May?”

“How many?” said Lee.

“An ass-ton,” said Chip. “Put it this way: I've moved more quads in the last few months than I had in the whole ten years before
that. I'm not naming any figures or nothing, but if I keep going at this rate, I'll be able to retire when I hit fifty, with a swimming pool and the latest Hummer in the garage of my four-bedroom home, in a neighborhood that's not going black.”

“I love the smell of racism in the morning,” I said.

“Why in the world would you need four bedrooms?” said Lee.

“Not to mention a gas-guzzling military tank,” I added.

“Who knows?” Chip winked. “At this rate, I might score me a sweet young thing to marry, have some rug rats.”

Chip followed this boast with a display of conspicuous consumption, swaggering over to the food stand to blow a twenty on a round of corn dogs and Cokes for the three of us. The corn dogs—golden-battered, deep-fried tubes of pure-T gastronomical bliss—smelled like paradise. But after the first bite, my stomach convulsed. I placed my tricked-out wiener onto its paper tray and set it aside on the bleacher. I doused my jumbo Coke with Beam. Gazed out at the inferno where the nine-to-elevens had started whirling around in pointless circles, an apocalyptic smoke cloud forming above the ruckus.

A teen girl came by selling T-shirts that read GODWEISER 300: THIS BLOOD'S FOR YOU KING OF KINGS. The shirt's beer-can logos displayed a poorly drawn crucifixion scene plus a winged ATV flying through comic-book clouds.

Winking creepily at the maiden, Chip bought three tees, gifting me and Lee with showy bonhomie.

The girl puffed out her little sparrow chest and grinned. Her braces twinkled optimistically in the autumn sun.

“This will help pay for our trip to Six Flags!” she yelled, bending forward to place her sweet mouth close to Chip's hoary old ear.

I felt ancient—brittle-boned and covered in malodorous barnacles—surrounded by swarms of shrieking youths. They writhed
like larvae all around us, every cell in their bodies stoked and firing at full potential. They radiated idiocy and nubile promise. They wore shiny synthetic sports gear, corporate logos emblazoned on their garish caps. They pecked at their phones, tweeted and bleeped and updated their E-Live statuses a hundred times, while I slumped, crookbacked and slurping my spiked Coke.

I was a sick man. I was a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I thought that my liver hurt.

Dark and cirrhotic, it festered down in the hollow beneath my heart.

Did my eyes fail me or was the girl actually winking at Chip, testing the potency of her blossoming womanhood upon my bloated friend? Chip smirked like a constipated walrus, his face on fire with a hypertensive blush. Yes, indeed she was. Winking and duck-facing. And when she flounced off with a wriggle of her proto-ass, Chip yelped in triumph.

“Hot damn! Did you see that? Fuckin' jailbait.”

“Not very godly of you!” I shouted, struggling to be heard above the din.

“You wouldn't know godly if it crawled up your ass!” Chip screamed.

“Is that some kind of reverse transubstantiation?” I cried.

“What the hell you babbling about now?”

“Some kind of Eucharistic enema?”

Just as I screeched the words
Eucharistic enema
, the ATV thunder ceased. My strange phrase echoed in the awkward silence. Chip winced. Random teens snickered and gawked. Lee giggled, muttered, “Romie's a trip,” and drew a phantom doobie to his lips.

My bladder was full. My left foot numb. I limped off to relieve myself as a dozen girls in red Godweiser shirts pranced out onto the field, where they began a lewd dance routine to a techno version of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The line to
the porta-potty was insane. So I dipped down to a pine copse behind the bleachers.

The wind howled cryptic messages to my stoned brain as I spattered a stump with piss. Gazing into the heavens, I saw a dragon-shaped cloud slither over the sun. The wind had a nip. A cold front was sweeping in. I heard a bellow behind me, zipped up my pants, and turned.

From the shadowy realm beneath the bleachers, where cigarette butts and soft-drink cans littered the squalid dirt, a creature came creeping. His hair was clumped, his skin ageless in its patina of grime. Exuding scents of bowel and forest, the ancient man-beast lumbered toward me. I recognized his harrowed eyes.

It was Jarvis Riddle, the alcoholic woodsman who'd stumbled upon my LSD-fueled frolic in the woods with Crystal Flemming some twenty years ago. I could still recall Crystal, a naked dryad reclining against a tree, her ivory buttocks cushioned by a bed of moss. I could still see the rictus of her horror as she spotted Jarvis emerging from the forest gloom, trembling with DTs and roaring like a Sasquatch. According to local rumor, his long-suffering sister had finally kicked him out of her shed and he'd pitched a pup tent in the woods. We must've interrupted his afternoon nap.

Now he supposedly lived in a lean-to deep in the swamp—in the spooky limbo between R.V. Garland's land and government property. As he crept toward me, I thought of all the poor misunderstood monsters from myth and legend—the Grendels and yetis, trolls and hunchbacks—gentle, red-eyed ogres with hoarse voices and broken hearts,
each one a rover of the borders . . . who held the moors, fen and fastness
.

“Can you spare a few bucks?” Jarvis stood at the edge of the bleachers' shadow, his leathery right hand emerging into the light to take my cash.

I slipped him a five.

“How did you hurt yourself?” His watery eyes brimmed with concern as he scoped my maimed hand.

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“A giant hog bit the tip of my pinkie finger off.” I grinned. “How about that?”

“Ah.” Jarvis Riddle shook his head. “I
can
believe you. Hogzilla strikes again.”

“How did you know?”

“I've had truck with that beast. The woods haven't been the same since he came. Unnatural monster. Sign of the end-time.”

Jarvis Riddle stared off at a dark cluster of clouds that hovered over the fiberglass steeple of Hampton First Baptist.

“Where have you seen him?”

Jarvis smiled cryptically. “Here and there.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not without compensation.” Jarvis shrugged apologetically.

I had no more cash on my person. As I regarded Jarvis's embarrassed smile, I wondered if it was true that he'd scored a full scholarship to Vanderbilt eons ago. That upon flunking out, he'd been drafted to Vietnam. That in the green steamy jungle, he'd become obsessed with the Book of Revelation and lost a few of his marbles.

“Where can I find you?”

“Out and about.” Jarvis smirked like Merlin and scratched his hoary head. “Where the albino gators slink.”

And then he retreated back into the shadows, his cryptic nature poetry drowned by the surge of revving engines.

“The Ten Commandments,” Pastor Logan's voice boomed over the PA, “a set of whoops bound to separate a rider from his quad: five jumps followed by a monster jump and a set of step-up
doubles. Are you godly enough to handle it? Onward, Christian soldiers!”

By the time I'd reclaimed my bleacher seat, the twelve-to-fifteens were tearing ass over the Wilderness: swerving around orange construction cones, leaping over sandbags, flying up ramps to monster-jump over picturesque man-made gorges worthy of a dystopian film set.

Youths shrieked like locusts. Teen girls writhed in ecstasy. Chip Watts bellowed like a bull, his face the color of liver pudding. Two of the drivers had been flung into the mud. Three were still lollygagging on the log obstacle. Chip's nephew Hunter was neck and neck with some other lad, flying toward the most monstrous jump of all.

“There they go,” Pastor Logan yelled, “a forty-foot whooped-out uphill climb, flattening out for a tabletop, then rounded with a step-down landing for one hundred and fifty feet of I-dare-you-to-try-it obstacle.”

Lee clapped politely. Chip Watts roared and waved his meaty fists.

“I told you Hunter could drive,” he screamed.

“Looks like Hunter Bledsoe's in the lead again,” the youth pastor boomed. “Talk about an adrenaline junky. Watch how he shoots up the side, speed-skates over that tabletop, and just flies over the step-down like a torpedo.”

And that was that: Hunter Bledsoe swerved to a halt, killed his engine, hopped from his quad, and strode onto the podium to join the pastor.

“How do you feel right now, Hunter?” Pastor Logan shoved his mic into the boy's face.

“I feel awesome.”

“Are you a righteous dude?”

“I am a righteous dude.”

“We all know Hunter's got high octane in his blood and a liquid-cooled four-stroke single-cylinder heart with four valves,” joked Pastor Logan.

The crowd shrieked. Hunter nodded modestly as three teen girls in cocktail dresses stepped onto the stage in high heels, each gal wielding a two-foot gilded trophy.

“Trophy time,” the pastor announced.

We had to sit there for another fifteen minutes as Pastor Logan plied the crowd with inspirational speeches. He reminded us that we were all Christian warriors battling Satan in the wilderness. He urged us not to get discouraged when thrown facedown into the mud pits of life. He advised us to climb back onto our chariots of fire and dart back into the fray.

“Keep on fighting evil.” He brandished a fist. “Fast and furious and bold.”

Cold wind swept in from the north. Tumultuous clouds hovered. I thought I spotted Jarvis Riddle slinking out to the parking lot, weaving through the glittering desert of SUVs.

“What y'all say we hit Bojangles on the way home?” said Chip. “Unless Professor Romie prefers a salad bar.”

“I could go for some chicken 'n' biscuits,” said Lee.

“Bojangles is cool,” I said. “I'm jonesing for some triglycerides and hydrogenated oil.”

“Whatever,” said Chip. “I don't care if the chicken's fried by third-world toddlers with third-degree burns. I don't care if I gain twenty pounds with every bite. I don't care if my esophagus dissolves from acid reflux and I get the runs for a year. I'm gonna eat my fucking chicken and biscuits and I'm gonna enjoy it. How 'bout that race, Lee?”

“It was awesome. Your nephew sure can drive.”

“Hell yes, he can.”

We walked to the parking lot. Chip was about to climb into the pilot's seat when Jarvis Riddle popped up from behind the Escalade's hood like a mangy Muppet. Chip winced, slipped a pair of aviators over his eyes.

“Thought I might have a word with you, Chip,” said Jarvis.

“Just a minute, y'all.” Chip grinned, shut the door of his SUV, walked off with Jarvis until they were almost out of earshot.

The two men stood negotiating in the shadow of an enormous Ram truck. I thought I saw Chip slip Jarvis some cash. Thought I heard the word
Hogzilla
emerge raspily from the vet's ancient, oracular mouth. After Jarvis Riddle staggered off across the parking lot, Chip came toward us, whistling with ostentatious aloofness.

“What was that all about?” I asked when we'd all climbed into the SUV.

“Oh, nothing.” Chip removed his sunglasses and pretended to adjust his rearview mirror. “Just a bum hitting me up for a handout.”

But I saw the flicker of fever in his eyes. I saw the veins of obsession. I saw dark pouches gathering beneath the windows to his soul.

Cold, calculating eyes of a hunter.

Crazy, monomaniacal Ahab eyes.